


Fish Out Of Water

by Potboy



Category: Stargate Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-23
Updated: 2015-12-08
Packaged: 2018-04-10 21:45:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4409003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Potboy/pseuds/Potboy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Artic adapts to life as the only Nakai member of Destiny's crew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“This is where you'll sleep,” says the alien named _An Area of Open Ground for Public Recreation,_ twisting one of its head tendrils around its nubby claw. Rrt!k thinks this one is an incubation pouch human, but ze isn't ignorant enough to believe that automatically makes 'Park' nk*t like hirself. The others treat 'Park' with more respect than that. She could be a very easy-going Ss! instead. At any rate, she is a person of importance, so Rrt!k only bows in thankfulness and lets her leave. Rrt!k does not ask what sleep is, nor what purpose the waist high soft pallet serves, nor when ze will be allowed to leave this small enclosure again.

Marvellous as the ship of fate is, ze has the squeezing pressure around the air sacs of one who has swum too deep. When ze tries to open hir door and go out to return to the bridge, ze finds it is locked. ze is alone among aliens and even the sheer undeserved honour of being allowed to be here will not make hir one of them.

The 'bed' is unpleasantly yielding, like a patch of carnivorous moss. ze doesn't think ze has been left here to be consumed, but ze is not certain enough to risk it. Jamming hir back into a patch of honest metal wall, ze slides down to huddle in the corner, balling hirself up as if to fit in the cracks and avoid being washed away.

The dark and cold of the deep places are in hir, telling hir ze should not have come, that the others might have despised hir, but they were eggs of the same clutch still, they had not deserved to be abandoned.

“Why do you keep attacking me?”

All hir vestigial fins raise in shock as a human blinks into existence in the centre of the room. Can they do that? Rrt!k has seen no evidence of teleportation in the minds ze has briefly touched today. As hir shock abates, ze notices the words had settled into hir mind without the strange gabbling of the humans. Mind speech, thank the distant ones. Also there is no smell.

“I have never attacked anyone,” ze thought back, memories of beatings and shunnings and kickings through the hard times running like a current beneath the words. Ze had borne them all with meekness as a nk*t should. Ze had never fought back, not once.

The human stands looking down on hir for a long moment, its face doing something ze cannot interpret, and then abruptly it is a Nakai. It is a vR*t Nakai of the highest caste, kingly and striped with the glowing lines of ancient divinity. Everything in Rrt!k seems to cry out in relief at once, accepting protection. Ze has crawled to him and put hir forehead down on his feet before ze has time to realize that the stripe on his forehead is the curve of Destiny's engines, like a crown, and the touch of his mind is a broader sea than ze has found in any Nakai of any tribe in all the years of hir life.

“Yes,” says the great one, more gently now, “I am Destiny. It seems to me that you love me.”

“I do,” Rrt!k tries harder to press close, and only then realizes that ze can feel nothing of this against hir skin. It is all inside hir head. The ship of fate is inside hir head.  _Hir_ head! As if hir unworthiness has been washed away. Certainly being alone among the humans does not matter now. Ze has been blessed and accepted by the only real power ze cares about. “I do. I always have. We all have.”

The ship croaks a sceptical laugh “And yet you attempt to destroy me to prove it.”

“No,” On this day of wonders even Rrt!k can say 'no'. “We wanted only to thin the shields, to come on board.”

“Yet on several occasions you have landed craft on my surface and you have not come on board. Why not?”

Rrt!k tries to bow forward to kiss Destiny's feet again, with as much success as last time. Ze thinks about the wars among the following fleet, about the controversies and the purification battles, and the three centuries long claim of the Tss'sh to be the only ones fit to step into the place where ze sat now. It comes over hir again like a wave – gratitude and wonder, painful to express. “None of us were good enough for you. I least of all.”

Destiny clicks deep in his throat, approving and a little wry. “That, you share with every other member of this crew.” He places his hand on the door and the lock clicks open. This is trust, and Rrt!k determines to be worthy of it. “Has it not occurred to you,” says Destiny, the lines of star scars glinting on his cheek, “that sometimes the strongest, strangest and most interesting things can be found at the bottom? I believe you will fit right in.”

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Artic doesn't want to put hirself forward, especially not with this human, but the one called 'Eli' insists. “You're going to have to talk to him sooner or later,” he says. “And trust me, it only gets more awkward the longer you put it off. I mean, I'd be in favour of putting it off forever, but on this ship, with Rush? Kind of not possible.”

Ze waits in the room known as the 'apple core' named after the remnant left after an Earth fruit has been eaten. Ze doesn't want to put hirself forward, especially not with this human, but the one called 'Eli' insists. “You're going to have to talk to him sooner or later,” he says. “And trust me, it only gets more awkward the longer you put it off. I mean, I'd be in favour of putting it off forever, but on this ship, with Rush? Kind of not possible.”

“He's not as bad as people think,” says the calm one, 'Brody'.

“Excuse me?” says 'Volker'. “I think you'll find he's exactly that bad and maybe a little worse.”

Brody makes a facial gesture that Artic doesn't yet understand, pointing his gaze at the ceiling. “Seriously?”

“He likes you. You get special treatment.”

Rrt!k is almost certain that Volker is nk*t like hirself. The way the others treat him – that blend of condescension and pity? His timorousness? It's desperately reassuring. Ze sticks with him where ze can, and tries to emulate him, as a proper human role model. Brody is a great deal more mysterious. He seems outside the categories, neither leader nor follower, neither treading nor trodden down. Perhaps he is some kind of priest? Special treatment would accord with that status.

“He's going to like you too, Artic, as long as you keep your mind on the math and not on the drama.”

This is valuable advice. The one they call Rush – undoubtedly because he is always in haste – is as vR*t as they come, and intimidating with it. No creature the Nakai encountered before has ever used their interrogation devices against them, found out more about them than they about it, exploded its tank from within and escaped. This one is terrifying, and it seems even its fellow humans are in awe of it.

However, it is the expressed wish of higher status members of the crew that ze should wait here and strike up a conversation with Rush 'to break a sheet of ice'. Which means that ze doesn't actually have a choice in the matter.

Ze will have to hope that Young will protect hir. Though Young's name possibly indicates that he is the juvenile among the three leaders, Artic thinks he is Ss! and therefore the natural counterbalance for Rush's strength.

Ze hopes ze is not reading this all wrong, but given that it is hir, ze probably is. Hir gills feel stiff. It has been a long time since ze has been in water. Ze has no idea how these humans refresh their bodies or their brains but ze has not been offered a tank, and hir position is too precarious to ask.

Perhaps if this goes well? Swallowing, hir mouth almost too dry to breathe, ze watches as the others depart, and crouches down to wait.

~

Alright, perhaps Rush hasn't been sleeping recently. By his calculation, there are almost two hundred and forty thousand miles of corridor unexplored on Destiny, and how can he really rest until he knows what's in all of them? There might be things of such wonder out there that he doesn't have the vocabulary to describe them. Knowing the Ancients, there might also be things of such terror it will have Colonel Young in a flap for a fortnight. Every moment that passes is a moment of lost opportunity to find out. How can anyone want to sleep?

Yet when he trips over something in the entrance of the apple core, and he turns and it's a crouching fucking monster like a spider the size of a man, a fucking blue tangle of skeletal limbs and claws and those unearthly glowing pitiless eyes, there is a moment where he thinks _shit, I'm hallucinating again._ _Maybe I should have napped._

Fire still sweeps over him, locking all his joints and tightening his skin. It's remembered pain, anticipated pain, and its grip is irrational, unmerciful, not to be fucking tolerated. He will not tolerate it because already, before his spasming muscles have fully unlocked, he's realized that no, he isn't hallucinating, it's Destiny's pet freak.

“What the fuck are you doing there?”

His chest is heaving, as though he's just burst out from underwater, and that's an insult, isn't it? Because he hasn't, and he should be stronger than this.

The creature flattens itself to the floor abjectly, knees and elbows bent up grotesquely, like something from The Exorcist. It can still pounce from there, he knows. He also knows that if it does, he has the strength to put it back down. The memory of tiny bones snapping under his throttling fingers feels like a shaking in his hands.

But it doesn't pounce. Instead, it croons “mmmm” in what is presumably meant to be a soothing tone, and slowly offers him one of their own telepathic enhancers. That's a nice piece of courtesy. Destiny's versions of the device do not have a 'torture' setting.

So now he's curious. Is it here to speak to him? It's avoided him for the most part so far, seeming to have found an instant kinship with Volker that doesn't surprise Rush one whit. He in return has avoided it. He would have been quite happy for that situation to carry on, but perhaps it is untenable.

Destiny's devices do not give him the shuddering feeling of having his head slithered through by intelligent slugs. He still affixes it unwillingly and thinks _What do you want? Can you not see that I'm busy?_

An overwhelming sense of apology, apology for its very existence, and he hasn't got time for that either. _Yes, you're unworthy,_ he thinks, _aren't we all? What are you going to do about it?_ _How are you going to win anyway?_

It risks pushing itself up onto its bony little arse, curling its long fingers around its shins. There's a moment of silence from it as though it has never considered just forgetting its unworthiness as a factor, moving on anyway. Its eyes flicker, dark and then light again. He thinks that's a blink and braces himself for what comes next.

It's maths.It's a computational analysis of the theoretical underpinnings of the countdown clock. There are at least three errors in the logic that he can see immediately, and probably more in the arithmetic, but its brilliant. It's brilliant unconventionally – well of course it is, human conventions can hardly be applied here – and it comes like a wash of cool blue water over the desert of his own attempts to grapple with the thing.

He pulls out chalk and begins to tackle the big errors. If they can be corrected and the connections still hold, he can--

The creature sends him a graph, mentally. It comes with all the context, even the wordless understandings, and that's just the most efficient method of collaboration he could ever concieve, and this is, well, this is marvellous, but they have forgotten to include the parameters for the control software of the FTL drives, which--

Artic holds out a hand. He drops a stick of chalk into it and offers the wall with a 'be my guest' gesture. Ze does.

Three hours later, Lieutenant James drags them both to the mess, and they carry on the discussion on the tabletop, eventually dragging Brody and Eli into the group-think with them.

That night he sleeps through, undisturbed by nightmares. After which, if sometimes his lymbic system still seizes up when he rounds the corner and runs into Artic unexpectedly, it means nothing. It's just one of those things that bodies do when they've forgotten that a colleague is not human and are rudely reminded of the irrelevance.

The creature is peaceful to have around, in fact. Never blabs of irrelevances, does not distract him while he works, unless it's to offer useful input. By the end of the week he's decided he'll take a dozen more like hir, if they're on offer.

There's still no love lost between him and the rest of the species, mind you.


	3. Chapter 3

Brody's radio crackles just as he's about to sit down to a bowl full of strawberry flavoured paste with a side of steamed onions. He doesn't want to eat it, but he doesn't want to go hungry either, so he compromises on swallowing it down so fast he can't taste it and grunting “Hm?” into the radio at the same time. 

It's Volker, thankfully. Not something awful. 

“Brody? Can you meet me in hydroponics. I mean, right away?” 

He would have trouble-shot, if his mouth had not been full. Figured out the problem first and gone with the right tools to fix it, but the strawberry-onion mix is taking too much effort to wrestle, so he just mumbles “Mm-hm,” adds extra water and gulps the rest of it like a shake before setting off. 

Volker's on the floor next to the door of the storage room in which Franklin has set up their ceramic, cylindrical planters. He's leaning against the wall with his legs stretched out, craning back over his shoulder to catch Adam's eye as Adam rounds the corner. He looks flustered and frightened, face rosy with blood beneath his very fair skin. 

Across his legs, Artic the Nakai lies face down, long hands and feet flexing against the deck plating, the slits beneath hir jaw stiffly gaping. 

“I don't know what to do!” says Dale, his hands suspended above the alien as though he wants to touch, to gather in, to give comfort, but he's afraid his touch must be painful. “Ze _crawled_ up to me and pawed until I sat down. And then ze did this! I… I don't think ze's well. I think...” 

Dale is a sensitive soul, and his reading of interpersonal situations is generally to be trusted. If only he didn't make himself sick with worrying about all of it, because nobody appreciates his soft heart as they should. 

“I think ze's come to me so that ze won't die alone.” 

Okay, so that's pretty awful if it's true, but Brody is noticing the way Artic has collapsed with hir head in the shadow of the planters. Every so often a drop of water will tremble from the end of a leaf and fall onto the back of hir neck. When it does, the flaps beneath hir jaw will pulse, and hir thin chest rise and fall as though ze is gasping. 

“What's ze thinking about?” he asks, because Artic and Dale are both wearing the thought sharing devices above their right eyes. 

“Oh, don't,” Dale sniffs for a moment, but knows better than to ignore one of Adam's questions. He knows Brody doesn't say anything unless there's a point to it. “Tears, mostly. And guilt, and resignation. Even some gratitude. Like I say, I think ze's dying. Water, under that. Oceans of water, like they must have had on hir home world. I keep getting pictures of weird sea creatures and eggs and eels. The silver meniscus on the underside of the waves.” 

“Ze's dreaming of water?” Adam asks for confirmation as he grabs one of the hoses they use to tend the plants. He's heard Rush's story of being held in an upright tank of water, Chloe's too. The humans had been given oxygen masks, but then they would have needed them. The Nakai would have figured that out, the first time their captive had drowned. 

“Ze's yearning for it,” Dale says. “Ze's hot and dry and ze can't breathe. If I try to touch hir, it burns-- Oh _what_!” 

Adam has turned on the hose and deluged Artic's head, soaking Volker's legs and trousers underneath it. Dale gives him a betrayed look, but Adam is watching the flaps behind Artic's jaw beat like cilia. Beat like gills. 

He gets back on the radio asap. Not rushing, just not sparing any extra time for Dale wringing out his pants. “Colonel Young? You're needed in hydroponics.” 

There's a part of Brody that's never forgotten the acute shaming Young inflicted on him, a part that even now wants to prove that he _is_ good for something; he _isn't_ a waste of space. He tries not to let it show, as Young rolls into the room with that short-legged sailor stroll of his and takes in the wet huddle of Dale and Artic with a faint look of concern. 

“What's up?” 

He's a man of few words, but then so is Adam. “I think Artic's aquatic. Maybe amphibian. I think ze needs to be underwater, at least part of the time, or ze'll die.” 

“That's why they had those tanks?” For a man whom Rush regards as some kind of neanderthal, Young connects the dots fast enough. 

“That's what I'm guessing,” Brody agrees. “I think we should tie a rope round hir and lower hir into the main water reservoir.” 

“Is that sanitary?” 

There are people who would hear subtext in that. _'I'm not risking my crew's health for the sake of some alien'_ for example, but Brody figures it's just a request for information and provides it. 

“Yeah, it's good.” He shrugs. “The water in the main tank gets pumped through three separate filters and a UV purifier before it gets to us. I mean,” he looks back down at the sodden puddle of his boyfriend and the creature who had gone from curiosity to mascot to colleague without any of them noticing the progression. “I can build hir a smaller tank of hir own in the long run, but right now I think if we don't want hir to die, we put hir down the main hatch right away.” 

Young nods and picks Artic up, shrugging the lightweight body over his shoulder as he radios for James to bring him a rope. “OK,” he says easily. “Let's do that.” 

~ 

Rt!k opens hir eyes. Hir inner eyelids are stiff as egg casing, frighteningly immovable, but as the water rushes in on them they soften and grow transparent once more. The strengthening golden light of hir eyes gleams out in the softness of a tideless sea and shows hir slipping convection currents like silver ribbons, and dark water, calm and cool. 

The ache in hir chest is easing, though hir gills are swollen and painfully raw. A fire of inner spines tells hir hir extremities are coming back to life. It takes a long while of dangling like a helpless cluster of polyps before ze realizes that some of the pressure around hir ribs is coming from a thin black rope that stretches taut between hir and the eye-sized blaze of a distant opening above. A metal ladder, bolted into the wall, reaches up into that burning place, where ze can distantly guess at the silhouette of one of the humans bending over, trying to see if ze is alive or dead. 

They have deemed hir worthy of rest. They have decided that ze is good enough to be permitted to continue to live. The triumph and the gratitude are worth the long, lingering misery of the test ze has endured. 

Since ze has been judged fit to live, to think, to be hirself, ze coaxes hir weak limbs to pry the rope over hir head. When ze lets it go, ze drifts like a dead airsnake slowly to the bottom of the place in which ze has awoken. A metal floor, dark as the metal of Destiny is dark. 

As the membranes of hir hands and feet recover, ze shakily begins to swim. And what a blessing that is – what a return to innocence, to ancestral memories. It is as though ze has been lost for a thousand generations, and now ze has come home. 

Ze swims a slow circuit around the vast, silent holy place that is this cave full of the sea. A vent in and a vent out create the mild, reassuring tug of a cross current, and at the bottom, furthest from the hatch, the wall kinks around the engines on the other side, creating a narrow, upright box the sides of which will protect hir from being swept away or eaten by predators while ze dreams. 

Ze wriggles hirself in there, and peace presses on hir once more. So much refreshment to make up, but now there will be the chance. 

Looking out on the emptiness of Destiny's great inner ocean, ze thinks _there could be fish._ Ze could make an ecosystem here that could be harvested for food. Ze could take this barren chamber and make it live. 

Perhaps it is exhaustion, or the nearness of death that breaks hir mind enough to let this unthinkable thought through, but as ze closes hir eyes again, wedged into the rumbling wall, awe and anguish and joy strike hir all at once. Because this is Destiny's pouch. Ze thought the ship was vR*t, but it is not. It is not. It is nk*t like hirself, equipped to carry life. 

Even the humans with their fascinating genes and their bright little minds live and work and breathe inside Destiny, waiting for their species to be second-born. Artic's joy rises out of hir in bubbles and sparkles on the roof of hir cubby hole. Ze had thought ze had left the eggs of hir own clutch behind, but here ze and the humans are Destiny's fry together. 

Ze had been waking alone for so long. Ze falls asleep surrounded by hir family.


End file.
